Amy Chazkel
Amy Chazkel is Associate Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. A specialist in modern Brazil, she teaches courses in various fields that include Latin American history, urban history, law and society in Latin America, historical methodology, and comparative slavery. Her book, Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Modern Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011), was co-winner of the J. Willard Hurst Prize for Best Book in Sociological History, winner of New England Council of Latin American Studies Best Book Prize, and received Honorable Mention for Latin American Studies Association/ Brazil Section Best Book Prize. A Portuguese translation of Laws of Chance is forthcoming in 2014 with Editora da Encamp. She has published articles on the history of penal institutions, illicit gambling, urban crime and society in modern Brazil, a collection of essays on police museums in Latin America, and co-edited issues of the Radical History Review that explore the privatization of common property in global perspective, Haitian history in global perspective, and the history of sport. She has held postdoctoral and faculty fellowships and visiting scholar positions at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, the Institute for Latin American Studies/ Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia, and the Center for the Humanities and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at CUNY. She served as Visiting Professor of History at the Universidade Federal de Santa Caterina in 2013. She is a member of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective and is currently serving as Co-Chair of the Collective. She is at work on two books: a study of the social, legal, and labor history of the nighttime in the nineteenth-century Brazilian city, and a co-edited anthology of primary sources from Rio’s origins to the present day (forthcoming in 2015).